Review: QlikView 11 Connects Comparative Analysis With Social Business Intelligence

QlikTech, (NASDAQ:QLIK), a business discovery vendor known for focusing on user-driven business intelligence (BI), announced a major update to its flagship business intelligence platform in October.

QlikView 11 builds on the self-service business discovery process with new features for end-users including comparative analysis, collaboration, social business discovery and a number of other user enhancements.

On-location mobile business intelligence was also enhanced in this release. QlikView apps are delivered via HTML5 browsers, allowing for a consistent user experience regardless of the device being used.

New Features Focus on Collaborative Discovery

In QlikView 11, both social discovery and collaboration are key themes. Collaborative annotation, collaborative workspaces and social sharing tools all serve to enhance the social discovery process for business intelligence users.

There are also features that provide new ways for users to leverage the collective intelligence in a group. In QlikView, your teams – or workgroups – can explore business data or create analysis to answer business questions and arrive at decisions through sharing and exploring the data as a group.

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Three QV11 Tools to Explore Data

QlikView 11’s approach for users is to ask what they need to ask and then explore the data from any direction without being restricted by predefined questions and data. Some of the new features are designed to make the decision making process more automated and collaborative. They include:

Collaborative Workspaces - Collaborative Workspaces lets users share analytics apps and data in QlikView with others. With this feature, any user can invite others to participate in a live interactive session. Those without a QlikView license can be invited to join with a single-use URL that can be sent via email.

Collaboration is something that works well in a business intelligence environment. Users who need to collaborate or share data are likely to find Collaborative Workspaces useful, and even wonder how they’ve been able to work all along without it.

The one potential downside we could see is a lack of management controls for the live collaboration sessions. This could be an issue if you have multiple session participants wanting to control the data at the same time during a session.

Annotation Feature - A new annotation feature enhances the overall social business discovery process by letting users post and respond to notes right in the context of any QlikView app. As you navigate through data you can include your own questions, answers and insights using the annotation feature to embed notes and comments anywhere – in charts, graphics and visualizations, so others can see the exact data or analytics app you worked with.

Annotations lets users follow what other co-workers have seen and noted about the data as you would follow any threaded discussion. It’s a quick and easy way to see how a decision was made, and it provides the organization with a long-lasting record of that decision.

Automatic Comparative Analysis - This new feature is used to contrast multiple data sets – for example, market basket comparisons in retail or stock performance analysis in financial services.

A business can create multiple selection states in a QlikView app and create graphs, tables or sheets that are based on different selections to compare multiple selections of data inside one document or chart. This lets users quickly spot trends or differences.

The comparative analysis feature will automatically provide a visual contrast of the performance across regions, time periods or any other measure. It’ll help users quickly gain new insights into patterns of use, opportunities and threats.

HTML5 Browser Provides Better Mobile Experience

In business intelligence, the mobile trend has been to deploy native apps for the popular devices being used by workers, such as Apple’s iOS or BlackBerry platforms. Native apps take advantage of functions that are inherent to different device platforms, but the native approach requires business intelligence apps to be developed for each mobile platform used in the organization.

HTML5 browser technology makes the deployment of business intelligence apps across multiple device platforms easier and faster for users and developers.

QlikView on Mobile delivered via HTML5 browsers provides an immediate user experience -- there's no need to wait for developers to roll out different versions of apps. The HTML5 browser also provides a consistent user experience across the different tablets and smartphones.

QlikView 11 Availability

QlikTech has always focused on the concept that business intelligence should be user-driven, and QlikView 11 provides a good set of tools to help users drive the business discovery process without needing heavy IT involvement.

QlikView 11 is available now, and an online demo can be found on the QlikTech website. QlikTech also offers a QlikView Personal Edition—a full version of the software supported by an online community of users.